


ONDINE AND THE MOUTHBREATHER

by rameseas



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, F/M, Irony, Magical Realism, Mermaids, Metafiction, Mild Sexual Content, Post-Divorce, Slice of Life, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-08-29 12:11:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8489176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rameseas/pseuds/rameseas
Summary: Spike credits it to the absinthe, to the sheer hysteria of this day, and to the past one hundred and five days he’s spent slowly and painfully ripping himself away from Julia that instead of doing something like screaming or fainting or just fucking dying from the shock of it all, he finds that it makes perfect sense to him that he should have met a cackling mermaid on the day of his divorce, that this sudden shift in his life from being a realistic if somewhat surreal tragicomedy to being a full-on supernatural romance is far from horrifying or unwelcome to him – in fact, he likes it.(AKA: a Sephardi Jewish ex-English major with a fresh divorce under his belt and a taste for the narratively ironic meets a rough-around-the-edges surfer chick with absinthe eyes and a fishtail where her legs should be. Love ensues.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> this came about almost entirely in response to [this picture](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/3b/88/b4/3b88b430afce19f0ac1d0c0d5e0ca0f3.jpg), which i had sitting around in my references folder and was specifically labeled 'SPIKE/FAYE'. leave it to me to extrapolate an entire au from a single piece of art.
> 
> it's more than a little presumptuous to ask something like this from a fan community (especially one as quiet and small as cowboy bebop's), but because i came at this from a super literary perspective, i'd _seriously_ appreciate some informed feedback for this thing. even if it's just something like, "wow this reads like something i read in high school!" or "the characterization is kind of wonky!", that would be totally awesome. thank you. ♥

** **

 

* * *

 

 

 **I  
** The first time he sees her, he’s freshly divorced and drunk off his ass on Jet’s homemade absinthe – the kind that Jet keeps in his grandmother’s old glass bottle in the back room of the bar, the kind that only Very Special Customers have any more-than-purely-legendary knowledge of, the kind that makes the notorious Green Fairy look like some ineffectual wannabe sprite decked out in cheap _Party City_ glitter, waving a ninety-nine cent plastic baton around and getting by on fleeting charm alone. He’s dawdling around on the lonely and illegal end of Long Beach – a narrow strip of shore where he risks getting arrested if he’s seen from the beach house porches of the snooty rich people with 911 on their iPhones’ speed dials – and because he drove straight from Jet’s bar straight from his long put-off divorce hearing, he’s wearing the suit he bought just for the occasion of getting dumped: a two-piece thing that’s too tight in the waist, the crotch, and the knees and made, stupidly enough, out of crushed blue velvet, because he’s never quite learned how to not make statements in boldfaced, italicized print everywhere he happens to wander, _especially_ when formally separating from the love of his life.

Spike Spiegel, aged twenty-seven, is feeding an Abita to the already massive, already thoroughly quenched emerald green monstrosity inside him as he half-strolls, half-stumbles along the darkening, mildly foaming shoreline, and it’s one of those moments in which he’s dissociating in the most former English major, supposedly former head case way possible – seeing himself as he would behind some imaginary cinematographer’s imaginary camera, watching from the outside every fumbled step, every single time the toe of one of his patent leather boots digs a bit too hard into the damp sand and sends him almost-reeling, every gross and embarrassing rivulet of piss-colored beer that misses his mouth by a centimeter or so and goes trailing down his chin and soaking into the white satin of his dress shirt’s collar, every time his eyes go glazed over and unwittingly shiny in response to something entirely internal. Outside-Spike doesn’t know what those internal things are. Outside-Spike doesn’t have keycard access to the contents of Spike’s head. All Outside-Spike is concerned with is how cinematic and completely unbeautiful this drunken walk of shame is, and if this lighting is okay or perhaps needs to be a touch warmer to pin the audience just right, and what song would work perfectly with this particular scene – something by Wilco, definitely, or maybe The Eagles if he’s going for a more retro feel.

“ _Desperado_ ,” he can hear himself whispering, over and over again because he can’t remember the rest of the goddamn words.

He’s on his fifteenth or sixteenth ‘ _Desperado_ ’ when at the very corner of his vision, a flash of something yellow-green and shiny hooks into his attention like it’s some wayward fish and reels it in fast. The sun hasn’t fully set yet – the topmost sliver of fire still hovering, stubborn, over the very edge of the water’s horizon – and it takes a good two minutes of Spike squinting like an old person into the blinding Atlantic; one very distinct moment in which he’s sure he’s just a plastered idiot who had only seen the sun’s shifting reflection on the ocean; and another, _more_ distinct moment where he laughs with his whole fucking chest at how hysterically _drunk_ he is before his gaze focuses on the violet-black head breaching the water’s golden surface – dark, _dark_ hair plastered wetly to a perfectly round skull, the strangest pair of eyes peeking almost shyly at him before their accompanying nose disappears into the shining sea.

The eyes are the very same green as the absinthe in Spike’s stomach.

“H-hello…?” He’s not sure if this fumbling, slurred acknowledgement is enough, so he raises his voice a handful of decibels and tries something else, something requiring an actual answer: “Are you drowning?”

Because of course, a drowning person would ostensibly reply – ‘ _Yes, I am. Maybe you could pull your thumb out of your ass and give me a hand, if you don’t mind._ ’

Instead of answering in such a manner, however – instead of answering _at all_ – the head retreats beneath the crest of a not-too large wave and is as suddenly gone as it was suddenly there only moments before. Spike is alone again – Abita in his left hand, inexplicable fistful of sand in his right – and so, because he’s half-certain his bereavement is literally driving him insane and because he came to this here beach to get blackout drunk and hopefully die a watery death himself, he keeps stumbling on.

The path his footprints leave in the sand is crooked – a v-fib EKG, Berenice’s Hair botched by the gods. His breath – warm, sticky, thick with alcohol and this long, noiseless groan that’s been pleading to vocalize itself for the past three and a half months, pleading in vain with Spike’s stubborn machismo, with his insistence on silent suffering, with his brooding, Byronic brand of Irony. The salt in the air that’s wafted off of the water is sticking itself to his crazy Jewfro and turning already kinky curls into these impossible brittle ringlets, mixing with the late summer sweat already drenching his scalp in a sort of frightening alchemy that reminds him, in a distant and sad way, of his mother’s constant battles with the top of his head in the days of yore – her digging her sharp red fingernails into his cranium, scrubbing and circling shampoo into his hair, bitching at him over all the time he’d spend wandering around on the beach like some stray dog, ruining himself and ruining his precious tresses.

As if he was ever destined for princesshood.

Thoughts of old Mama Spiegel – of anything except that which sounds vaguely like ‘ _holy shit_ ’, really – leave Spike in a single aquatic jolt when the lukewarm tide rushes up past his ankles, halfway up his velvet-encrusted shins, all the way to about two yards beyond where he stands on the shore before rapidly receding with an unexpected force – a force that disturbs our poor drunken hero’s balance and has him staggering backwards and landing squarely on his ass on the freshly-soaked sand, Abita bottle tumbling from his nimble pianist fingers in the process.

As soon as the bottle hits the ground, a small aureate hand is darting out and snatching it up, and Spike is so disoriented by _all of it_ – the fall, the theft, the totality of the day – that it takes him longer than would ever make sense for him to register that the violet-black head has returned, and its mouth is wrapped around the lip of his Abita bottle.

 _Her_ mouth, that is.

Spike will, in several years’ time, look back on this day and on the fact that after her eyes – her _wild_ absinthe eyes – her mouth was the very first thing about her that metaphorically, metonymically left him punch-drunk and in crazy Beyoncé love, and when he does, he will laugh like a goddamn fool, because it will make too much sense and he will be the self-fulfillingest prophecy of all self-fulfilling prophecies for it. The instant he declared himself a lit/writing major eleven years ago was the instant he resigned himself to a life filled with narrative conventions he’d never not pick up on; the ultimate benefit of this comes from the fact that it is insanely funny, and that Spike’s particular sense of humor makes it even _more_ so.

Her mouth is red like it shouldn’t be, red and full and reminiscent of cherry tomatoes and bleeding ulcers all at once. That repeatedly mentioned slick of violet-black? That’s the oil spill of hair that plasters itself wetly to her skull and face, shining strangely in the dying sunlight. Her jawline shapes itself like the bottom half of a heart and she’s got a set of facial features that are invariably hard to place – one moment, she looks like she might be East Asian, with her high and full cheeks and the angled, feline slant of her eyes, but then the light shifts and her lips become too full or her nose becomes too Greek, and Spike has no _idea_ what she looks like, but he knows that he likes it, knows he can’t stop looking at it, at _her_.

“Uhm,” he quips.

Dream Lover – no, _Witchy Woman_ – simply blinks at him in response, keeps on guzzling down with almost alcoholic fervor his stolen Abita from where she sits in the water about ten feet away from him, most of her concealed by sea foam and the translucent Atlantic. Spike is free to notice in his silent, grasping struggle for words that her sun-kissed shoulders are bare and that, as far as he can tell, she’s at least _half_ -naked. This makes speaking moderately more difficult, I’m sure you can imagine.

“What are you doing here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?” Her voice is harder than he expected it to be – not the husky drawl he anticipated, but Scarlett Johansson with a wet cough and an alien accent. When she mirrors the question back to him, she pulls his bottle – now empty – away from her lips and tosses it back in his direction so that it can land sideways in the wet sand in front of him, taunting and hollow.

Spike doesn’t think – he just answers. “Working up the courage to drown myself.” It’s only fifty percent a lie.

Witchy Woman’s facial features reconstitute themselves again, arrange themselves into an expression that should be concerned but is filled with something way too much like curiosity to count as such. She drifts forward through the water without seeming to move at all, shoulders giving way to the barest hint of cleavage that hooks into the bottom of Spike’s gut and rips violently downward – because of course, it would be too much like the right thing for him to _not_ be emotionally aroused by strange skinny-dipping women only hours after his divorce – and then, fucking _weird_ as all get out, she folds her shining, bizarrely coppery arms over the water’s surface just the way one would atop a desk, delicately lays her pointed chin upon them, and asks Spike, in the most non-alarmed, inquisitive fashion imaginable, “Why?”

And this, really, is the moment he should have realized that he was talking to a fucking mermaid.

Intoxicated and exhausted as he is, though, the concept doesn’t even so much as cross his mind as anything more than a passing, momentary fancy; all he truly has the energy for is slurred and forthright speech. “I just got divorced,” he says.

Her voice turns incredulous. “That calls for killing yourself?”

Spike can’t actually fathom there being a flaw in this perfectly logical line of thinking, so when he answers her question, he answers like it should be completely and utterly obvious. “ _Yeah_.”

And wouldn’t you know that she – Dream Lover, Witchy Woman, _whatever_ her name is – she _laughs_ at him, right in his pretty, delusional, self-hating little face?

She doesn’t just _laugh_ , either – it’s a full blown _cackle_ , sharp and high and sounding all the world like brass and steel pots clanging together and the crazy, squealing calls that dolphins make – and Spike should be seeing it now, should see the golden-green tailfins that momentarily splash up from beneath the sea surface in the water witch’s full-bodied glee, and the scales crawling like beautiful, shining eczema up her back as she pulls herself further up the sea-covered shore to meet him, and the actual _slits_ gashing deep into the sides of her neck – not bleeding and yet opening and closing with each rhythmic, joyful breath she takes – but all he’s paying attention to is her tomato ulcer mouth, and her absinthe eyes, and the shining beacon of her face when she looks directly into his and says, verging on whispering, “Come closer, will ya? I wanna tell you something.”

Unmoored and on his knees, he does just what he’s told.

She – the Witchy Woman, the skinny-dipper, bare-breasted and gleaming all over in the fast-fleeing sunlight – grabs Spike directly by his velvet collar and drags him halfway into the water with her with a strength that Spike has never felt before – a strength that’s half-real, half-imaginary, like part of it exists only in some Otherworld unknown to him – but instead of forcing his head below the surface like he thinks she will at first, instead of _killing_ him for being something so stupid and so trivial as _suicidal_ , she rises up out of the Atlantic and presses her dripping, naked body fully against his, and she says to him with tomato lips moving right up against his ear, “You’re kinda cute for a mouthbreather.”

“What are you talking about?” He says this against her ear as well.

“I’m talking about your lungs, lunkhead.” Her breath smells like fish and seawater and is full of that harsh, wild laughter.

“Are you going to kill me?” And of course, _of course_ –

 _This_ is the fantastic, pivotal moment when, looking down past the curve of her bare shoulder, he finds the Witchy Woman’s ass and legs nonexistent, finds in their place a massive, winding tail covered in scales in shades of brass, gold, and a green as green as the sea, and Spike credits it to the absinthe, to the sheer hysteria of this day, and to the past one hundred and five days he’s spent slowly and painfully ripping himself away from Julia that instead of doing something like screaming or fainting or just fucking _dying_ from the shock of it all, he finds that it makes perfect sense to him that he should have met a cackling mermaid on the day of his divorce, that this sudden shift in his life from being a realistic if somewhat surreal tragicomedy to being a full-on supernatural romance is far from horrifying or unwelcome to him – in fact, he _likes_ it.

He likes it even more when the fishwoman giggles and says to him, “It’s _New Jersey_ , fool.” – and then, pulling away from him with spirited eyes – “Bring me another beer tomorrow. Sing me Sinatra so I’ll know it’s you.”

And as she draws away from him, leaving twinned heat and frigidness in her wake where they’d been touching, Spike finds that he suddenly has the wits enough about him to ask her, faster than he should probably be able to with all the little emerald fish swimming around in his head, “What’s your name?”

The fishwoman just laughs her brassy metal laugh at him, then she’s gone – disappeared into the Atlantic with a flick of her great tail and a wave that soaks Spike up to his navel in her wake. Spike knows that he’s drunk, knows that his heart is broken, knows that his mental faculties have never aligned quite right – Mother Spiegel used to swear up and down that he was born with his brain wired all wrong, that it was all that damn marijuana she used to smoke at her private women’s college in the sixties, long before she ever met her sperm donor – but even with all this knowing, he still swears up and down that this Witchy Woman is completely real and that she certainly did not come crawling (swimming?) out of the hole absinthe and his ex-wife left in him, made by the good Lord and himself simply to lick his wounds. There was no licking at all, in fact.

It’s on that note that he falls asleep, right there on the beach. When he dreams, he dreams of seashell-encrusted lion-dogs chasing him off this illegal strip of shoreline, and wealthy women with his mother’s manicures calling the fuzz on their rhinestone-covered iPhones, but really, nobody disturbs him in his slumber. Not even the mermaid.

 

* * *

 

 **II  
** Her name is _Faye_ , he learns the following evening.

Spike returns to the beach after the sun has already set, treating the incessant pounding in his skull and the fuzziness behind his eyelids with a touch of hair from the dog that bit him, and after skirting with bare, sandy feet the portions of the shore untouched by Tiki torch illumination or warm yellow porch lights and reaching the small, grayish dune that lies about a yard past the northernmost beach house, where the moneyed, sleepy neighborhood _finally_ gives way to undiluted nature – he opens his mouth and gives Sinatra his very best gravelly, baritone, tobacco-roughened shot.

“ _Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars_ …”

He’d spent the day sleeping in bed, having stumbled his way from the beach to his beat-up hooptie and driven back to his sad, sorry trailer park home after he’d woken up in total hungover agony with a fucking hermit crab on his face on the edge of four in the morning. Then, rousing again at five PM, he’d passed the most artistically productive afternoon he’d had in ages hunched over the old African mahogany typewriter Julia had given him three years ago as a wedding present – deft fingers flying over ivory keys like they hadn’t since his university days, tracing rapidfire over thoughts of glittering scales and puffy gold leaf cheeks – and four hours later, with the glowing green digits of his desktop alarm clock screaming ‘ _9:19_ ’ at him and every cell in his body singing as if he’d suddenly metamorphosed into a García Márquez or an Edgar Allen Poe, he’d realized with a loudly uttered ‘ _shit!_ ’ that he had a date with a fishwoman and he was running _awful_ late.

There’d never been a moment when he’d doubted the veracity of his bizarre memory. There had only been the subliminal fear of a woman’s rejection, and that, he’d been carrying around like Linus’ blanket since the age of thirteen and the first time he’d ever looked at a member of the fairer sex and felt anything more than pure mystification – felt things warmer, _stranger_ than simple confusion.

“ _Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars_ …”

He’d stopped by Jet’s first to get the beer, asked for only one bottle before remembering himself and tacking two more onto his order. When he’d initially walked into the wood-paneled, neon-lit bar just five blocks from his trailer park – showered and fresh-faced and bereft of the copper-rimmed aviators he’d been using to hide his obvious mid-afternoon/early evening drunkenness since he’d first served Julia divorce papers three months ago – a look had come over Jet’s face like a three-headed Martian had just entered his place of business, and he’d said, polishing a whiskey tumbler with a raggedy chartreuse dishcloth, “Spike? You in there, buddy?”

And Spike had replied, “I wrote two-thousand words today.”

“Mr. Big Stuff.” Jet had reached preemptively for the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam behind the counter before Spike deterred him with a raised hand of dismissal. “I thought for sure you’d have hung yourself from your damn shower rod in the state you left in yesterday.”

“And you didn’t call the cops?”

Jet had given him a wide, toothy grin, then – something wry and wolfish, as furry along the jowls as the man perpetually was. “I told you I only love you for your money, boy.”

“ _In other words: hold my hand._ ”

Spike had initially taken his sandals off in the interest of making as little noise as possible while picking his way along the beach – the sharp, clapping sounds his flip-flops made when they smacked against his heels was much too obnoxious to risk on this quiet Tuesday night – but the longer he’d walked barefoot on the shore, the more he’d convinced himself that it wasn’t just practicality that had driven the decision: he’d been willfully _whimsical_ , maybe even _romantic_ in a way he’d forgotten to be in the wake of Julia, and he’d elected to feel the wet earth beneath his feet for reasons that were purely sensory and quaint and not at all driven by a want for privacy and a night not spent in jail.

And then, of course, once he’d found his half-hidden place in the sand, he’d started singing classic Frank and that’s where we are now – Spike with three Abita bottles wedged into the silty ground between his loosely-crossed legs, crooning alone on the beach and calling out for the unimagined fishwoman of yesterday.

“ _In other words: baby, kiss me_.”

Now is when she shows herself: indigo hair breaching the water first; then her striking, nebulous face; then the glittering, unclothed whole of her – gills, fins, and all. Just like the day before, Spike finds that her nakedness doesn’t touch him physically, but makes his heart beat staccato and jazzy against his xylophone ribs on purely emotional, sentimental bases – her navel, his mouth doesn’t ache for, but his fingers are itching for his typewriter again; her breasts, he’d _die_ to lay his head upon, but only so that he might listen for a saltwater heartbeat or sleep soundly for the first time in a small eternity, because they look _comfortable_ , almost _inviting_ in the way only _homes_ are –

“Good,” she says to him, laughing dolphin-like and hoarse. “You’re not dead.”

“Of course not.” Spike offers her an unopened Abita. “I had to find out your name first.”

That’s how he learns that her name is _Faye_.

She didn’t have one for _years_ , she tells him – when she’d first sprung into being, writhing in a mass of seafoam and saltspray, her identity was a blank space waiting and ready to be filled in by the Atlantic and the sand and whatever whispered-giggled-screamed conversations she’d overhear from beach-going Jerseyites. She’d liked _July_ for awhile because it was the month she’d been born in; when she was seven, she’d heard the word _Wandering_ and it sounded so much like her that she’d called herself by it for months; and there’s a sea plant far beneath the surface named _Padina Gymnospora_ that she’d shared a name with for almost a whole year – but it was the wild-eyed little girl who got lost on this end of the beach just before it had been built up for rich folks that truly struck her, the little girl whose mother came calling after her in a high, panicked voice, calling her ‘ _Faye!_ ’ It was _her_ that Faye had taken and folded permanently into herself at the wee age of sixteen, when she’d been _dying_ for some stability in the ceaseless adolescent sea-change of her life.

“How old are you now?” Spike asks her, watching her close her bloody lips around the lip of her beer bottle.

“Lost count,” she says into the bronzy glass. “Doesn’t matter.”

Sometimes, when the upper-crust teenage boys from parts of the beach further south lose or forget their surfboards on the shore or in the sea, Faye will temporarily exchange her shining tail for a pair of legs and ride the waves ‘ _the way the mouthbreathers do_ ’.

“Do you know The Beach Boys?” she asks Spike very suddenly and very intently, staring into his face with a sort of penetrating focus that makes the other feel as though his skin might fall off, just being looked at like that.

“Yeah,” is his reply.

“I found a Walkman with a surfboard once, with a cassette tape of The Beach Boys.” – mind you, she doesn’t actually use the words ‘ _Walkman_ ’ or ‘ _cassette tape_ ’; Spike just fills them in based on her descriptions of a ‘ _mechanical melody box_ ’ and the ‘ _black ribbon rectangle_ ’ inside – “Their music was very soothing.”

“You know, they stole a lot of their ideas from other artists.”

“How else do you create art?” she retorts, and for an uncultured, parentless fishwoman, she knows things about the world Spike hasn’t ever quite come around to accepting – things about art, and suicide, and the best IPAs out there.

She’s married to a bottlenose with a name Spike can’t pronounce – something filled with lots of squeaking; several strange, sighing breaths; and that characteristic dolphin whistle-clicking that’s so much a part of Faye’s laughter – but she hasn’t seen him in over a year, she says; she’s starting to suspect something happened to him during one of his seasonal trips to the Carolinas, that maybe he got caught in some careless fisherman’s net or met someone cuter than her, less prone to hysteria and more dolphin-shaped.

“I just get so lonely this time of year,” she tells Spike. Her hair – unsubmerged for almost an hour now, that’s how long they’ve been sitting out against this dune, listening to her achronological account of her own life’s story – is still saturated with residual dampness but much drier than it was when she first emerged from the Atlantic, dry enough to dance in the marginal breeze and tease at her bare shoulders and Spike’s naked cheeks. “Everyone is leaving to go back where they stay through the Fall, the Winter, and the Spring, and I’m still _here_.” She pauses to sip from her beer. “Scavenging for booze and surf.”

“Why don’t you leave, too?”

“Because I’m scared.” And there she goes, looking laserlike into his eyes once again. “Because I like it here.” At that, Spike emits a short, snorting laugh.

“What’s so fucking special about _New Jersey?_ ”

“The mouthbreathers, of course.” Spike grins.

“There’re ‘ _mouthbreathers_ ’ all over, Faye.” She grins right back.

“None of them are quite like you,” she says. He doesn’t know if the ‘ _you_ ’ is plural or singular. He doesn’t think he needs to know.

When she tries to show him her legs, she ends up stumbling and falling nearly face-first in the sand – too used to moving through a groundless, virtually surfaceless medium that constantly shifts beneath and around her – so instead of assuming an upright position, she lets Spike drape each aureate limb across his sweatpantsed lap and run his fingertips along the beautiful green-gold psoriasis scattered in scaly patches all over her shins and calves. When he touches the shining copper on back of her left knee, she asks him to take her back to his mobile home with a forthrightness _so_ much unlike that of the support group drifters and alcoholic ex-housewives Spike encounters on a near-nightly basis at Jet’s –

“You have a pair of scissors?”

“M’pretty sure, yeah.”

“I want to cut my hair. Bring me home with you.”

So Spike puts her in his holey Monkees tee – she all but _swims_ in it, considering her smallness relative to him and the fact that he’s basically a _giraffe_ – and shirtlessly carries her back to his car in lieu of forcing her to walk the almost-mile back on jelly legs. The farther they drive from the shore, the more fidgety Faye gets – pulling nervously at her hair, crossing and recrossing her ankles, calves, and thighs – and Spike is about to ask her if she’s okay, if she wants to go back to the beach, when she gives him the shock of his life and reaches across the center console to take his right hand where it’s hooked around the bottom of the steering wheel, pull it forcefully away from the faux-snakeskin and squeeze it _hard_ in her own hand, sharp little fingernails biting piranha-esque into his skin.

Because _obviously_ , the handholding is the most disorienting thing about Faye – not her protean nature as a Jersey Shore fishwoman, not her past, not her eyes.

He offers her an old pair of boxer-briefs printed all over with tiny green fish after he’s carried her up the steps and into his mobile bachelor pad; when she curls her top lip at him in response, he puts a towel in the bathroom sink and lets her cut her hair over it just as bare-assed as she pleases, and he watches – stupidly rapt – from the toilet as she takes his pair of kitchen scissors to her long, silky tresses.

“There was this magazine I found on the beach last week.” _Snip, snip_. “It was ruined, of course – the water had gotten to it before I had – but on the cover there was a picture of this woman with her hair like this.” She takes her hair in her hands and pushes it up around her jaws, mimicking an A-line bob. “And I knew when I saw it that I needed to look like that.”

“Your hair is beautiful, though.”

“I know it is.” _Snip, snip_. “That’s why I don’t want so much of it anymore.”

Spike thinks he understands.

When she has trouble reaching the hair at her nape, he takes the scissors from her and stands behind her to get it himself – shears the oil slick from her head as close to her neck as he can get it. Abruptly, accidentally, and not at all uncomfortably, they meet each other’s eyes in the mirror – Spike a full head taller than Faye, Faye suddenly this edgy, vaguely punkish chick he’s so very pleased to know – and the second they do, Spike asks Faye, “Why did you show yourself to me yesterday?”

“You had beer,” is Faye’s simple, matter-of-fact reply.

“Why did you ask me to come back today?”

“I had to give you _some_ reason not to off yourself.”

At this, Spike _grins_ , watches Faye’s expression slowly mirror his own in the reflective glass that frames the two of them, and because the moment and her answer beats _something_ into him – a vivacity, a _life_ that’s been so hard to come by these days – he presses his face into the back of her freshly manicured head and lets it linger there for awhile.

 

* * *

 

 **III  
** He falls in love with her while sleeping with her in the most literal sense – nothing illicit, nothing sexual, just the literal act of sharing a bed with her is enough to sink him the way he’d dreamed of doing on the day they first met – tying stones to his ankles and letting gravity do the rest. Her stones are mother of pearl instead of his ugly granite, though, her ropes chains of cowry shells and coral reef where his were rusted iron, and when she drags him to the ocean floor, there’s nothing desperately fatal about it – it’s just cool, and clean, and maybe even accidental, but not bad at all.

She spends her days purloining spray-painted surfboards and inspecting knick-knacks left near the shore by negligent and absentminded beachgoers. He spends his in an ashtray, copywriting out of practically nothing advertisement after advertisement for the likes of _Goldstein and Vogel, LLC_ and the _AquaVentura Ophthalmology Clinic_ and _Flowers by Flo_ ; after a week, he can hardly remember the last time he’s seen Jet. In the evenings, though, Spike drives down to their illegal end of the beach, picks Faye up (always bridal style, always after he’s lent her another ratty and faded band shirt), and takes her back to his home where they’ll watch Turner Classic Movies in bed and he’ll rub lotion on her legs and arms until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore.

And the first night, he falls asleep too fast.

The second night progresses in much the same fashion – her stomach sounds like the sea and a song and a sound soother, so much so that it’s only _minutes_ after he’s laid his head down there that he’s out like a light.

The third night, he tells her, “I don’t have any friends, you know.”

“Why not?”

“I’m kind of a pretentious asshole.” When she lightly digs her toothy little fingernails into his scalp – arbitrarily or not, he can’t quite decide – he chuckles and rubs a lopsided circle into her stomach with the pad of his right thumb. “Plus, most of the friends I did have were my ex-wife’s. When I filed for divorce, they all took her side.”

“Why did you divorce her?” Faye asks the question in that intensely forthright, tactless way she always does, completely devoid of any sense of social niceties or privacy. It’s for the same reason that she makes ugly faces at Spike every time he offers her a pair of his underwear or college gym shorts to wear, the same reason she grabbed his hand not a full twenty-four hours after meeting him – she’s autistically, inhumanly honest and strange, and it thrills Spike almost to the point of speechlessness.

Until, of course, he _can_ speak.

“She was sleeping with my best friend.” He releases a tired breath against Paul McCartney where he’s screenprinted onto the shirt he’s given her to wear tonight. “I caught them _in flagrante delicto_ and everything.”

“What does that mean?” _Of course_ she wouldn’t know of such an expression – Spike promptly feels like the pretentious asshole he called himself moments earlier.

“Means I caught them having sex.”

Faye makes a nebulous sound of acknowledgment, maybe even hurt; almost in unison with the dark-haired beauty on television – to Spike, she looks like Vivien Leigh – she pushes her dry, chapped lips against the crown of Spike’s head, and Spike remembers that he needs to buy her some chapstick tomorrow; she’s been complaining about the cracking since yesterday.

He tells her about the old biker bar he and his aforementioned best friend used to haunt in the days after undergrad, decked out and faintly ridiculous in studded leather jackets and ripped skinny jeans. He tells her how they used to play Cowboys and Indians in their old neighborhood park and _Pac-Man_ and _Super Mario Brothers_ in Mama Spiegel’s basement among her sewing mannequins and dusty reams of fabric, when they were eleven and twelve and just getting to know each other (when Faye asks what all of these games are, Spike describes each of them to her in great detail, because he works on his own time and tomorrow is Sunday, after all). He idles briefly on the subject of Julia, her published volumes of poetry and her Ivy education and how she’s always been so much better than him and that he pretty much fell in love with her instantly, but when he goes suddenly quiet under the weight of the massive stone sitting on his chest, Faye pulls one of his dark curls between her fingers and asks him to tell her more about his meth-head ex-bestie.

“He started asking people to call him ‘ _Vicious_ ’ after we started hanging around in that biker scene.” Spike shakes his head, snorting something hard and derisive at the thought. “He even asked his mother to do it.”

“What’s so wrong about that?” Faye sounds offended when she asks the question, and Spike realizes then that she – with her endlessly mutable identity and the multitude of names in her past – doesn’t and probably _can’t_ see Ichiro’s melodramatic name change the way he does: completely and almost _laughably_ juvenile.

So he says, “Because it wasn’t him.”

“How would you know?” She does so much to effortlessly unpack him, it drives him insane.

“Because I’ve known him for over a decade. And because when you rename yourself, you’re like – trying to define and pin down with a single word this grand narrative about who you think you are, but that doesn’t even exist. You’re _never_ permanent – you’re just a wandering signifier, there’s no such thing as an _essential self_ –”

“What if you’d _like_ to be permanent, though?” When Spike raises his head to look into her face, she isn’t solemn, or angry as he’d expected her to be – instead, she’s grinning at the popcorn ceiling and her absinthe eyes are _dancing_. “Or better – what if you _rejoice_ in your unpermanence…” – she does that all the time, creates words that don’t exist – “And celebrate it by giving yourself a new name?” Then she looks at him, smirking, full of knowing and wisdom and self-adoration. “What if tomorrow I decided to call myself ‘Spike’?”

Spike laughs. “Why’d you want to be called that?”

“Because I’ve worn a shirt and slept on dry land for four nights in a row.” She traces her fingertips down the side of his face, tickles them against the stubble he hasn’t yet shaved. “Because I smell like you now.”

And he could _kiss_ her for that, could hitch her shining legs up around his hips and enter her and make her his – but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even _want_ to – it wouldn’t feel right.

He just lays his head down against her breasts – which, wouldn’t you know it, _are_ just as comfortable as Spike thought they’d be? – and sighs himself to sleep, and when he wakes up two hours later to find her not in bed with him, find her instead naked and fast asleep in the jade-tiled bathtub with legs exchanged for tail and her head halfway below the water’s clear surface, bubbling rhythmically around the gills, he consciously thinks it to himself for the first time – ‘ _I’m so fucking crazy about her._ ’

 _– Eshet chayil mi yimtzah; verachok mip'ninim michrah_.

He’s always had a thing for not-quite-human women – he’d been married to a vampire, once upon a not very long time ago – but he never expected things to go this far.

On Sunday night, she finds his old Kabbalah books while lying around on his living room floor – this time sporting The Rolling Stones – and when she asks him to tell her about them, he finds himself talking about his mother instead – something he didn’t even do with _Julia_ , and they’d been married for three years.

“She was this crazy, _crazy_ fucking Conservative Jewish woman who looked just like me.” Spike shakes his head, laughs. “With a cigarette in her hand constantly.” He holds his own up by way of demonstration, drawing his elbow in close to his waist and flicking his hand outwards on a deliberately limp wrist. “Like this.”

Faye laughs her metallic, dolphin laugh, and Spike can’t breathe for a full minute.

He tells her about Mother Spiegel’s special parental philosophy of liberal beatings and frequent tongue-lashings – “All Jews argue,” he says, half-joking, “But my ma elevated it to an art form, an Olympic sport, and a religious virtue.” He tells her of how much the woman loathed his strange, esoteric interests; his absolute indifference if not antagonism towards visits to temple; his deplorable heathen godlessness – how all of these things contributed to the explosive end of their relationship once he’d left the house for college. He shows her the old, mostly faded scar right above his left buttock – a forget-me-not left over from one particularly brutal whipping he got at the age of nine, one that broke skin, had his mother fussing and apologizing and coddling him to death for weeks – and he confides in her, chuckling fondly, the time she accidentally ashed her cigarette on him and left him screeching like a girl.

“Boys screech, too,” Faye says, talking to him like he’s slow. “I’ve heard them.”

“I _know_ ,” he replies, and – lowering himself off of the sofa and onto his knees, getting down on the floor so he can stretch out next to her where she lies – he lets his tone go low and sheepish as it very often is in the face of her piercing insights. “It’s just a shitty expression.”

“Don’t use it anymore, then.” She sidles over to push her fingers into his hair; he looks up into her golden face.

“Okay,” he says, and much to his surprise, he actually means it.

They sleep together in his bed for weeks. Spike watches Faye’s hair grow little by little every night. There are still times when he will wake somewhere between one-thirty and four AM and discover Faye lounging or snoozing in the tub, hydrating herself, but these occurrences grow less and less frequent the more time they spend together, learning one another’s worlds like texts, teaching each other how to _walk_.

One Friday night, three weeks into their knowing one another, Spike puts _Fleetwood Mac_ on the turntable and asks Faye to dance with him. She clutches onto his arms for dear life all through _Monday Morning_ and _Warm Ways_ , but by _Rhiannon_ she’s standing a little more firmly on her feet, brave enough to take tiny pigeon-toed steps away from him and curl her feet into the carpet for traction. During _Landslide_ , she’s all by herself – twisting slowly yet confidently in the middle of the living room with her arms above her head and her eyes blissfully closed, and Spike can’t do anything but watch her wide-eyed and rapt with awe, watch her until she looks at him right in the eyes and wordlessly grants him the courage to finally say, “I like you.”

And she laughs, of course – she _always_ laughs when he tells her something stupidly obvious; drapes her arms over her head and turns her beautiful back on him. “I know that.”

“I mean–” He crosses the floor to put his hands on her without thinking, holding her still with his palms around her middle, caressing her through UB40. He presses his face into the back of her head the same way he did the night she cut her hair. “I like you _a lot_.” The last time he said the words – words he’s saying without really vocalizing, words stuck like asphyxiating food in his throat – he ended up right here in this trailer park in Shit Central, New Jersey, jilted and heartsore.

“Why else would you bring me home with you every night?” Faye turns around to face him and lays her hands down on his coat hanger shoulders, and she’s smiling at him with all of her imperfect, pearly teeth. “I like you too, Spike.”

Shockingly (or perhaps not, considering her everything straightforward and cutting and bare), _she_ is the one that kisses him first. _She_ is the one that puts her gilt hands on his olive face, pushes their lips together like they’re children learning to do it for the first time. It’s clumsy, it’s bold – it’s everything Spike wanted it to be and more.

“ _Mmnh_.” His fingers dig _hard_ into her sides, find purchase in the soft, blubbery flesh beneath his t-shirt.

She closes her teeth around his bottom lip. She kisses him with her eyes wide open. In bed, with all of their clothes off, she lays over him like the sea trying to keep the secret of sand – the great green ocean saying to the land, ‘ _you are not gold, but you belong to me_ ’.

Spike buries his face in the place where her neck and shoulder meet and agrees with the sentiment completely. “You got me bad, lady,” he whispers. “You got me bad.”

 

* * *

 

 **IV  
** For their one month anniversary, Spike takes Faye to meet Jet.

“Well, well, well.” Jet is already grinning before Spike is even fully in the door. “Look who decided to show his face ‘round these parts–” And just as quickly as the smug, shit-eating expression appeared on the old bartender’s face, it’s gone – comically evaporating as soon as right alongside Spike walks in a knockout beauty with an in-toe gait, barefoot and clad in a lemon yellow t-shirt temporarily masquerading as a dress. He openly gapes; Spike is about ninety-percent sure he did the exact same thing when he first saw the fishwoman, too.

“Jet, this is Faye.” Pride swells up in Spike’s gut when Faye does just what they’d practiced all night between drugging kisses and long conversations about nothing – reaches across the bar to take Jet’s hand and give it a firm yet genteel shake.

“ _Ahh_.” The intonation is knowing, almost taunting. “So _this_ is where you’ve been for the past month.” While Faye and Spike exchange momentary looks – hers one of faint perplexity, his verging on sheepish – Jet presses this smitten, old-folksy sort of kiss to the top of Faye’s hand, says, “I’ll bet you have _no_ idea who I am–”

“Of course I do.” Faye blinks, and her face and all of the air surrounding it seem to suddenly bloom with sea flowers. “You’re Jet. You’re a Sagittarius. You like long walks on the beach and Long Island Ice Tea.” Since she started spending her nights in Spike’s bed, watching Kubrick and Hitchcock and Welles, she’s taken on behavioral cadences pulled straight from the 1950s and 60s: a delicately up-titled chin, a certain sensual heaviness in the eyelids, a slight pucker in her bottom lip.

Jet, naturally, falls in love with her _immediately_.

“I’ve known this fuckin’ kid since the days when he wore double-breasted suits to class and waved his fake around like a goddamn medal of honor,” he confides in her, some type of secretive and intensely chummy Spike has never quite seen in him, after her third or fourth Sex on the Beach – which, of course, Jet highly recommended, and which, of course, made Spike snort his complimentary ice water right out of his nostrils, unintended relevance and more-than-fitting mental pictures being entirely to blame.

“His _fake?_ ” Faye asks, breaking off from one of her insanely long sips of fluorescent orange.

“Fake ID,” Spike is quick to clarify. “For acquiring booze.”

“I wish I’d had’da camera and recorded those nights for posterity.” Jet folds his thick, pit bullish arms atop the mahogany bartop, sends a half-dreamy sigh up towards the mirror-paneled ceiling. “If only you coulda seen him: this goofy-looking kid, all arms and legs, with a head full’a curls, hunched over a goddamn _moleskin notebook_ in the middle of this bar on a fuckin’ Tuesday night.” He lets loose an obnoxious, almost childish snort. “Don’t know why I ever believed he was twenty-one when he was _clearly_ just– the _quintessential_ emo hipster teenage douchebag with momma issues.”

“I had a very mature face!” Spike protests.

“You had’da _fat wallet_ is what you had, _Hebe_ ,” is Jet’s almost immediate retort, delivered with the warmest, chestiest of laughs, and Spike only lets him get away with the casual racism on account of his Ovaltine skin and their eight-year friendship – a friendship that has at times doubled as a therapeutic doctor/patient relationship, sometimes even as something bordering on father/sonnish, especially in the early days of their acquaintanceship. “Don’t even kid yourself – tryna tell me you looked _mature_ when you were practically still pissin’ the ten-dollar pants you were walkin’ round in, now if that ain’t a _gotdamn_ _lie_ –”

It’s only customary that Spike and Jet should devolve into possibly the most aggressive manner of good-natured ribbing then: Spike all lanky, gesticulating arms and pointing, accusatory fingers; Jet suddenly the Louisiana native he truly is, accent coming out loud and clear and charming Southern euphemisms in full force. All the while, Faye watches them with Hepburn-esque captivation – not _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ -like, but _After Hours at Jet’s_ in the face and the fascination and the ultra-clear light in her emerald eyes as they flicker between bartender and faithful patron – and when, on the ass-end of one particularly witty jibe passed from Jet to Spike across the bar, she bursts into the dolphin-like laughter that sunk Spike for good the first time he’d ever heard it, both men turn to her with the kind of crazy, terrified love on their faces typically attributed to Greek sailors moments before they’re being dragged to their premature deaths by sirens.

“That’s my girlfriend,” Spike mentions, offhanded, proud, just in case Jet had any lingering doubts on the matter.

“You better hold onto her,” is Jet’s intensely serious reply, tinged audibly with New Orleans and middle-aged wisdom. Spike, of course, intends to fully.

He takes her to a frankly ridiculous array of overnight eateries in a vain attempt to broaden her palate when, with his head on her stomach and her fingers in his hair one Thursday evening, she reveals to him the hysterically puny extent of her diet under the sea: local small fry and raw soft-shell crab.

“That’s it?” he asks her, raising his head up from velvety cotton to level her with a sad, incredulous sort of look. She shoots him a vaguely annoyed one in turn.

“What, did you think I could just drop by my local _Mickey D’s Under the Sea_ and pick up a Big Mac?” It often astounds Spike, the strange mix of pop culture awareness and ignorance Faye seems to possess in varying amounts – sometimes she’s so well-versed in it all she might as well pass for a ‘ _mouthbreather_ ’; other times it’s as if she’d grown up in an alternate dimension altogether (and hadn’t she?). She presses the pad of her thumb into the fleshy midpoint of Spike’s mouth, says, “I get by on just what I can get my hands on.”

And because that depresses Spike with a depth he can hardly articulate, the following night, he takes her to _Rudy’s by the Sea_ and treats her to the cheapest, tastiest three-cheese lasagna one can find on the shore.

“It’s not gonna bite you,” he tells her, just this shy of smirking, after watching her down three glasses of Rosé and poke experimentally at her pasta with a downright perplexed look on her face over the course of a whopping five and a half minutes. He tips his chin upwards for gentle emphasis, lets his voice go soft and buttery the way it is when they’re in bed. “Go ahead and try it.”

“I’ve never had _cheese_.” She twirls a thick string of parmesan around the tines of her fork. “What is _cheese_ like?”

Spike smiles, encouraging, around a mouthful of fettucine. “Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

The night ends with Faye blowing pale yellow chunks on the beach, Spike’s pianist hands in her hair, and a night of rubbing small circles into the fishwoman’s bloated belly. Who would have guessed that a mermaid would turn out to be lactose intolerant?

Thinking Mexican far too risky after this little adventure, Saturday night sees Spike driving Faye – clad in one of his older, longer button-downs and a pair of three-dollar drugstore flip-flops – down to the Mediterranean eatery five minutes away from his and Julia’s old bungalow. This time, they take things slow with a simple spread of pita, hummus, and grape leaves and a wholesale avoidance of anything even vaguely smacking of dairy on the menu, and when Faye takes to the baby steps meal with a fervor Spike has only ever seen her express while _a)_ drinking, or _b)_ kissing him, he counts it a small yet no less substantial victory –

That is, until the hours she spends on his bathroom floor later in the evening, absolutely green in the face, head cradled against the toilet seat and stomach emitting a veritable symphony of gurgles and groans.

“Maybe it was the gluten?” Spike muses aloud – to the air, to the murky toilet water, to the invisible lion-dog perched on the edge of the tub. Half-joking, he circles his hand against Faye’s stomach through the gap in her unbuttoned shirt and asks, “You think you might have celiac disease? Can mermaids even _have_ celiac disease?”

“I think you might not be rubbing hard enough.” She turns her head towards him just enough from where she sits halfway in his cross-legged lap to give him one of her many colorful, deeply loving looks, and as she whips back around to empty more of her stomach’s contents into the toilet bowl and Spike presses his lips into the violet-black back of her head, it occurs to him that she can throw down a six-pack of beer like he’s never seen before in his life, and his gluten theory is promptly shot right to hell.

They try the Chinese place down by the boardwalk and the noodle joint across the street from Jet’s. They go for Vietnamese one night and Indian the next. They even pay a visit to a dark, dinky little vegan place Spike once swore up and down he’d _never_ set foot in – not even for Julia during her halfhearted two-second _Save the Earth_ phase – and a kosher-keeping Jewish joint that he hasn’t seen the inside of since he was seventeen and still under his mother’s roof – all to no avail. Every evening, without fail, they end up on Spike’s bathroom floor or pulled over on the side of the road or kneeling on the shell-speckled shore with Faye’s head bowed and Spike murmuring a steady stream of _sorries_ into her hair, wondering silently about the intricacies of mermaid anatomy and what kind of _insane_ digestive system his girlfriend might be saddled with that she should be biologically forbidden to ingest _anything_ – except, of course, for small fry and soft-shell crab.

Then, a miracle arrives. It comes in the form of a medium order of fries from the McDonald’s by the beach.

Spike watches, almost petrified, as Faye picks from his bright red carton increasingly large bundles of fried potato while they sit together on the same side of a window booth. He watches the fries between her fingertips double from one to two and eventually to four. He watches as she first licks all the salt from each golden fry before nibbling the potatoes down to miniscule stubs, watches her eat the way small children do – playing with her food, taking her time – and through his thick haze of mounting fear, he manages to dip his head and rub his mouth against the scaly curve of her left shoulder, momentarily dig soft and playful incisors into the bronzy flesh there.

She doesn’t get sick that day. It’s the first night in over a week that they don’t fall asleep on cold tile, lullabied by her quiet gurgling.

Instead, they spend the evening back in their favorite place – Spike’s bed – and rather than retasting her dinner and the bitterness of her own stomach acid, Faye tastes Spike in all of his savory-sweet-saltiness: mouthing hungrily at his bottom lip, his stubbled chin, the prominent jut of his Adam’s apple and the sharp square of his jaw.

Instead, Spike kisses Faye on the mouth rather than on the clammy crown of her head or the back of her shaking hands, kisses from the dimpled corner of her full, pillowy lips to the patch of green-gold scales behind her left ear to the small divot at the median of her clavicles, where he darts his tongue out to taste.

She makes a noise somewhere between laughing and choking.

He turns the licking to sucking, closes his mouth around a rounded knob of bone.

 _Instead_ , he snakes his hand down between her naked thighs and circles his fingers there the way he’d been circling them over her lower abdomen in the previous nights, and when her mouth echoes the circuit – makes a shape and a sound like ‘ _o_ ’ – his crescents up into a slowly waxing grin.

 _Instead_ , she claws at his t-shirt until she can pull it up and off of him, grinding the whole of her into the whole of him, and when she _eats_ at him – bites a red and hungry path from his lips to his chest to the olive stretch below as if to consume him in desperate, loving chunks – he just laughs, _welcomes_ it even.

She kisses him as if to flay the skin off his bones.

He kisses her as if gasping for air.

When she finally takes him swimming off on their illegal end of the beach, he really _does_ gasp for air – chasing after her in the less-than-transparent Atlantic with long, paddling arms and legs – and it occurs to him then that the day they met, he’d been on the very precipice of sanity and only _she’d_ had the grace to give him a good _shove_.

It occurs to him that he very much _likes_ this insanity of his, the way it suddenly makes so much more sense now that he’s with her.

It occurs to him – buck-fucking-naked and blindly following a fish-tailed woman down to the ocean’s floor with absolutely no fear in his heart, the way life only happens in drunken adult fairytales from his old lit courses and the incomprehensible Freudian dream work of one particularly memorable therapist – that he could build a _castle_ on this madness, could live out the rest of his days in a shitty trailer park home with his crazy mermaid girlfriend at his side and feel – if nothing else – completely, wholly _happy_.

It occurs to him that only Faye could make this possible.

She breathes through her mouth directly into his when she resuscitates him on the shore. He comes to and sees nothing but green for the first few blinding seconds – green that gives way to absinthe eyes, and violet-black, and the woman he loves, scales and all.

He _did_ ask if she was going to kill him, once upon a time.

 

* * *

 

 **V  
** She asks him to marry her at five-thirty on a Saturday afternoon.

Well, she doesn’t _actually_ ask for that exactly – there’s no mention of matrimony in her proposal at all, in fact – but her words, her manner, everything about her seems distinctly nuptial to Spike when she pulls his hand into her slick, scaly lap, wraps a twine of stag seaweed around his ring finger, and says to him, “I want you to take me to California.”

“Why?”

“I’m tired of this place.” She lays her head against his shoulder. “I’ve been here since I was born, all two-hundred years ago.” Note the fuzzy place between sarcasm and seriousness that her words occupy. “I want to go on an adventure. I want to see the country.” Then she looks at him, emerald eyes bare and so piercing. “I want to go someplace with you.”

And for the first second after the words have left her, all Spike sees is Julia – nagging him for novelty, bemoaning her boredom, delving into book clubs and married women’s networks and scuba diving lessons and eventually his best friend – and he’s in terrible, blinding, _excruciating_ pain.

The next second, he sees Santa Monica and all of its surfers and jet-setting tourists and ritzy businessmen and fucking _dolphins_ , and he sees Faye begging those parties for beer and wine coolers and vacations in the Pacific, sees her taking off and leaving him with nothing but her pots and pans laughter to remember her by.

The next second, he sees the thousands of miles of dry, dry, _dry_ highway between the Jersey shore and the California coast, sees a Mom-and-Pop roadside store in Bumfuck, Arkansas with Faye in his backseat literally _desiccating_ to death – scales falling off and lips shriveling up into pale dead raisins – and this is the scariest scene of them all, really, scarier even than a repeat of his last failed marriage, the one that damn near drove him to a suicide that _Faye_ saved him from –

But then Faye straightens up beside him and turns his head to face her with strong, insistent fingers, and she says to him – with that telepathic knowing he blames in no small part for their insane, unlikely love – “I’m not scared.” She brackets his jaws with her hands, brushes her thumbs over the crest of each olive cheek. “Don’t be scared.”

Then, Spike sees their ratty apartment close to the beach – decorated with nautical maps galore and seashells snatched from the shore – sees Faye stealing California surfboards from those California surfers and him buying her pristine, unsoaked issues of _Elle_ and _Cosmo_ for her to flip through on the beach, sees the low-key copywriting job he will have and the autobiographical short stories he will submit to literary mags, sees them going to bed together every night, in a home they call ‘ _theirs_ ’.

He sees every single McDonalds, In-N-Out, and no-name fast food joint in West California, sees them gorging themselves on French fries and spiking their soft drinks with vodka and tequila, sees himself drunk and her nowhere near it, holding his curly head in her lap and clicking-squealing-laughing like a dolphin at him – he sees this in L.A., and San Francisco, and Berkeley, and Santa Cruz.

He sees a cooler full of water bottles and Jergens in the backseat of his hooptie, stopping every hour or so to hydrate and rub lotion all over Faye, sees them taking two-hour showers in horrible hotels and motels stretching from here to their West Coast El Dorado – sees them _kissing_ in them, with hard water in their mouths.

“Don’t be scared,” she tells him again in a whisper, putting her lips right next to his.

Fiddling his weedy, green engagement ring around his finger, Spike presses his mouth into the curve of her chin and says, “I’m not.”

**Author's Note:**

> " _eshet chayil mi yimtzah; verachok mip'ninim michrah_ " - in hebrew, "who can find a wife of valour; for her worth is far above jewels."
> 
> comments, critiques, and questions are heavily encouraged and heartily welcomed.
> 
> \- gabi


End file.
